What's the slowest machine you ran Win2K on?

[RVN]

A buddy has an old Compaq Armada PII laptop w/64MB ram and wants me to clean out the garbage ...it's trashed. Time to overhaul and "We're fixin' to find out!"

What's the slowest/oldest hardware you've sucessfully ran Win2K on? ...without limping?

 

[xcript]

A P200 with 160 megs of ram.

 

[johnjkr1]

P150, 64mb ram. The P2 is plenty of processor, might want to splurge for an extra 32-64 mb or ram though.

 

[doug]

I have run it on a P 166 MHz with 64MB RAM but it was painfully slow.
A PII 400 MHz with 128 MB RAM wasn't too bad.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've run W2K on a Pentium 100 (yes, an old one), but I had 128MB or 256MB of RAM in that box too. W2K is more RAM-dependent than CPU-dependent, at least as far as the OS itself goes. (I wouldn't try to run a media-player app on only a P-100 CPU.) I've also run W2K on a P-166 with 48MB of RAM. That was fairly painful, so much so that I would recommend running Win98se instead on that spec of a machine. Unless you like pain, don't run W2K on anything less than 128MB of RAM, and XP on anything less than 192-256MB.

 

[Psych]

My school runs Windows XP with only 128 MB of RAM with P3 733 computers. But I definitely wouldn't recommend using such a system for serious working/playing.

 

[nsafreak]

Ack, a P3 733 in itself isn't bad, even for Windows XP like Windows 2K it's more RAM dependent. Have Windows XP running just fine on a PIII 500 and 256 megs of RAM.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Celeron 300@450. The machine wouldn't run at stock speeds. Not sure why.

 

[Steve]

Pentium 133 MMX with 96MB on a 3.2GB HDD, in an old IBM ThinkPad 310ED. Slow but stable.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Pentium pro 200 with 128mb of ram
and I also tinkered with a Dual Pentium pro 200 with 64MB of ram and 96MB of ram.

A slow CPU isn't so bad, but anything less than 128MB of ram is gonna suck.

 

[aberant]

quality dual P166 non MMX with 64mb EDO ram. Those were the days.. oh wait no they sucked. Thank for for my SN41G2 😀

 

[burnedout]

What's the slowest machine you ran Win2K on?

A dual Pentium 133 with 64 MB of EDO. The only reason was to test the board and see if SMP worked. The system was sluggish, but otherwise ran alright.

 

[mikecel79]

Pentium 90 with 32MB RAM and an ancient 3GGhard drive. We're talking 10 minute boot times here! We did it as an experiment. It was only going to display a web page up on a monitor all day.

 

[zerocool1]

keep in mind I'm running xp pro on 64 mb edo ram on a p2 350

 

[Grasshopper666]

P2 should be more then adequate.

I've run it on Celeron 300's with 128MB, SP4, Office.. it runs. It won't win any races, but it runs.

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: nsafreak
Ack, a P3 733 in itself isn't bad, even for Windows XP like Windows 2K it's more RAM dependent. Have Windows XP running just fine on a PIII 500 and 256 megs of RAM.

I run WinXP Pro on a P3-733 and 192Mb of SDRAM smoothly enough for everything except tons of media.

 

[dakels]

still have a P133 64mb 2gb running as a network print server.

 

[Rottie]

I have Dell Lattitude XP (486DX100) laptop running on win98se but it still slow cuz it has 24MB memory I might want to run Susie Linux 7.2 on this laptop.

 

[ToeJam13]

A buddy has an old Compaq Armada PII laptop w/64MB ram... ...What's the slowest/oldest hardware you've sucessfully ran Win2K on?

I used to own a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a PentiumII/266 with 64MB of RAM and a 10GB Travelstar. It originally ran NT4 Workstation, but was later upgraded to Win2K Pro and then XP Pro.

Under both Win2K and XP, performance was rotten. Boot up times soared, Win2K worst of the three. I became an expert at disabling NT services I didn't need. Running one application was sluggish, but several caused the system to swap like a banshee.

I upgraded the 32MB expansion module to a 128MB module, giving me 160MB total. I also upgraded the Travelstar HDD (10GB, 4200 RPM, ATA-4, 512KB cache, 12.5ms seek) to a newer Toshiba HDD (40GB, 5400 RPM, UDMA-6, 8MB cache, 12ms seek).

The difference was amazing. My laptop booted in half the time, most noticable with application loading in the background after logging in. I could have all of my productivity and Internet applications running, and the system would hardly swap.

Some apps were still sluggish, like Visio bringing up a diagram, or Acrobat Reader rendering a page with lots of fonts and graphics, but overall system speed was very good for such an old system.

Overall, with the added memory and faster, increased storage, the system was very usable. Prior, it could be considered an emergency backup system at best.